wanna-be-a-Debian-system-administrator

Source: WikipediaI’ve already wrote about installing IE on Debian, but since then things changed a bit and today I finally succeeded to make it run on my Etch box. While the first time round I installed IE due to web-design issues, this time it was IE-only pages that forced me to search for the solution.

The first and most important step is to fetch the latest-greatest Wine version. The whole process is explained at Wine home page so I’ll mention just the necessary commands:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

and

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/soces.list.d/etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

Now we can start following the installation procedure described at IEs4Linux web page. Since the procedure mentioned there is for Sarge, I’ll copy the necessary commands below:

apt-get update
apt-get install wine libxxf86dga1 libxxf86vm1 cabextract

and

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

While this should usually work, I encountered a problem – missing mfc42.cab file. Googling around I found it here and downloaded it into ~/.ies4linux/downloads/ie6/EN-US/ folder.

cd ~/.ies4linux/downloads/ie6/EN-US/
wget http://activex.microsoft.com/controls/vc/mfc42.cab

And after that the install script worked without flaws.

Yes, I’m a web developer and unfortunately I need IE for my work. I never used it and I have no intention to use it as my browser since it is far far from Firefox, but there are too many people using it to just ignore them and create web page that doesn’t look good in IE.

When people will become smart and start to use Firefox or other browsers I will not need it anymore. But since this utopian day is still far away I will say THANKS to Sérgio Lopes for creating IEs4Linux. (more…)